[PARIS] 7 January 2015 - As spontaneous gatherings of solidarity with the victims are happening in dozens of cities across France even as I pen these words, it should be clear to all that this attempt to divide and intimidate people has failed. Certainly, the revue Charlie Hebdo is adept at satirizing religion, including my own. It also routinely makes fun of all sorts of other subjects and people. This is their right. Freedom of expression is the only guarantor of liberty, including the freedom of worship.

[Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris] Those of us who remember the old Latin Mass know that it always ended with the reading of the opening of John’s Gospel: In principio erat Verbum… The priest who could rattle it off the fastest and get us out was always the favorite. And yet, this text of all texts deserves to be taken slowly, like reciting a great poem by John Donne, savoring a 100-year-old cognac, gazing at a Cézanne. “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word dwelt among us…”

Christmas 2014, The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. We get “joyous” from “joyeux.” The English say “happy” Christmas, Americans have kept that lovely word “merry” alive. “Noël” is a mysterious word, not Latin or Greek or even Hebrew in origin. Originally it was a cheer when the king visited or the queen gave birth or French arms won a victory. Hooray for the newborn Prince of Peace! Joyeux Noël is also the name of a film that came out nine years ago. It depicts an event that happened exactly one hundred years ago tonight. On Christmas in 1914, French, British and German troops declared a truce in order to celebrate Christmas together...

The ministry of Bishops Against Gun Violence in The Episcopal Church is not confined to America. Firearm use in murders is widespread, and we all must respond to it. The shocking murder of the sister of the Bishop of Honduras, Natalie Lloyd, among other cases, proves this.
The popular image abroad of the United States is that we are the land of the cowboy gunslinger. The high rate of homicides and suicides by gun, the increasing incidents of school shootings since Columbine, the worldwide publicity surrounding the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, and news stories of American parents starting children as young as three with real firearms, all contribute to this unflattering stereotype.

Sunday we were blessed by the presence of Father Bernard Kinvi in our midst. He referred to the above Gospel text as God's formula for Love. Indeed, his words both during his sermon at our 10am service and during the later informal dialogue in the Parish Hall were an inspiration to enlighten “the eyes of our hearts”. Father Kinvi is a Roman Catholic priest of the Camillian Order. Immediately after his ordination in 2010, he was sent from his home country of Togo to direct the hospital at the Catholic Mission in Bossemptele, Central African Republic. He arrived there during a period of relative calm only to find himself by the end of last year in the midst of horrific violence...

[Episcopal News Service, Huși, Romania] The Rev. Dorothee Hahn is well into her third year as an Episcopal Church missionary in Romania. The former lawyer from Germany is committed to supporting struggling families and otherwise walking alongside the rural community in Huși, near Iași. A priest in the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, Hahn’s missionary work began through a partnership between the Romanian Orthodox Church and her former parish in Munich, Church of the Ascension. Ordained in 2005, being an Episcopal priest is an important part of Hahn’s identity, so...

What if you received a gift, and the only way you could truly enjoy it was to give it away?
This week I have been reflecting on the importance of exchanging gifts within the Church and greater world. In ecclesiastical circles, the term "exchange of gifts" hearkens back to Unitatis Redintegratio, the Second Vatican Council’s decree on Ecumenism, and is featured in a rereading of that decree and its implications 40 years later by then President of the PCPCU, Cardinal Walter Kaspar. These two documents represent formal and high-level institutional attempts at approaching the oneness Jesus prayed for in John (John 17:20), and Receptive Ecumenismexpands and develops many of the principles found within them.